Foster care and adoption; toddlers to young adults; it's all here-- faith and humor meet as this mom of four chronicles the joy and heartbreak of motherhood.

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

November, 2011-- Jacob, six feet tall

Six feet tall—with permanent teeth

Nine years ago, when our oldest son Jacob was seven, I wrote
a column about his permanent teeth. The
infant I used to carry tucked snugly in the crook of my arm is now a kid who
runs around at recess with permanent teeth. The thought is startling. I am
beginning to realize this growing thing isn’t temporary. It keeps happening.
Just when I get used to a new phase of parenting, it ends and turns into
something else.

And now Jacob is taller than me. Not the kind of taller
where people say, “Wow, could it be that you’re taller than your mom, now?
Stand back-to-back, let’s see.” No, that type of taller lasted about four days,
until after one long night’s sleep, it seemed, when Jacob woke up six feet
tall, but still 120 pounds.

Six-foot Jacob lopes around the house, his long legs striding
back and forth over that line between childhood and adulthood. In some ways,
he’s simply a larger version of the seven-year-old with the new permanent
teeth—he asks permission before taking a second serving of dessert; he needs to
be reminded to pick up his towel off the bathroom floor; he’s as excited as the
rest of the kids to see his toddler cousins on an upcoming trip. But in other
ways, that seven-year-old Jacob is fading fast as I glimpse the man my son is
becoming—he keeps his own lifeguarding schedule and drives off to work; he refrains
from commenting on how pathetic I am with electronics and simply troubleshoots;
he looks into his future and is making plans that have little to do with Bill,
me or the rest of the family.

When Jacob was seven, I wrote: While his arms and legs will continue to grow, his two front teeth are
as big as they’ll ever be. And it makes me wonder what else about him is
permanent. His quiet, thoughtful personality seems pretty well set. He’s not
one to grab center stage and I doubt he ever will be.

I was right—Jacob was quiet and thoughtful at seven; he’s
quiet and thoughtful at 16; and I am certain he’ll be quiet and thoughtful at
40. It is so strange to go back and read
it now. Some parents, who are significantly more organized than I, have well-chronicled
baby books and scrapbooks of their children’s lives. We don’t have family photo
albums; most of our photos aren’t even printed. They sit in a folder on my hard
drive, organized—thanks to iPhoto--by
season and year. But I also have these monthly 800-word pieces of writing that
are the window into the mind of a younger mom, of younger kids, and through
these pieces of writing, I see where my children and I have been together.

My challenge with parenting has always been to appreciate
the now of it. I breastfed my babies with
an eye to preventing allergies and childhood sickness. I practiced letters and
sounds with my preschoolers so they would be ready to read. I saw the boys’
(and now the girls’) early-grade school mistakes as opportunities to teach
important life lessons about responsibility and character. My motherhood has
been spent with an intentional approach to shaping my children and pointing
them in the right direction. I have had days where I have felt wildly
successful at this, and other days where I have felt abject failure, but
through it all, I have always mentally flipped ahead the calendar of each
child’s life to see where my good or bad parenting of that day might land that
child.

And now, for Jacob, all my shaping and pointing are pretty
much done. We have 21 months left with him until he leaves for college. While I
can see flashes of that seven-year-old with the sprinkling of freckles and new
permanent teeth, I know that the rest of the world cannot. The rest of the
world looks at my son and says,“This is
who you are,” without comment on who he was in the past, or what he might
become in the future. And I am learning to do the same. Jacob is smart and
funny. He’s interesting to talk to. He beats me in ping pong, but I can give
him a good game, and we should play more than we do. We joke about how opposite
our personalities are, but we know we have a lot of similarities too-- an
affinity for Frisbee, listening to NPR’s This
American Life, and reading accounts of near-death experiences. He is my
son, but he’s also a person I enjoy living with, and if everything about him
now fused permanently, and he didn’t develop beyond where he is, he’d still be
in great shape. And that makes it easier for me to live in the now, because I’m not too worried about
who he is going to become.

Jacob. Still with those same teeth he had at age seven.
Sometimes he comes to me for advice; sometimes I go to him.

I’m 5’7”; he’s six feet. We look up to each other. And I
hope that will be permanent.

About Me

Annemarie writes locally and nationally on foster care, adoption, parenting and spirituality. She is responsible for the content in At Home with Our Faith (circulation 80,000), which has won the First Place award in its category from the Associated Church Press for three consecutive years. Her Training Wheels column has appeared in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald since 2002 and most of these blogs appeared first in her Training Wheels column or as a chapter of her book, Discovering Motherhood (Ambassador Press, 2006). She is married to Bill, with four children (two biological, two adopted), and works in a job-share position at Johnson Controls as director of Corporate Programs in Diversity and Public Affairs.